this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2025

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126

Why do low framerates feel so much worse on modern video games? (pawb.social)

submitted 1 week ago by VinesNFluff@pawb.social to c/nostupidquestions@lemmy.world

65 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Like I'm not one of THOSE. I know higher = better with framerates.

BUT. I'm also old. And depending on when you ask me, I'll name The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask as my favourite game of all time.

The original release of that game ran at a glorious twenty frames per second. No, not thirty. No, not even twenty-four like cinema. Twenty. And sometimes it'd choke on those too!

.... And yet. It never felt bad to play. Sure, it's better at 30FPS on the 3DS remake. Or at 60FPS in the fanmade recomp port. But the 20FPS original is still absolutely playable.

Yet like.

I was playing Fallout 4, right? And when I got to Boston it started lagging in places, because, well, it's Fallout 4. It always lags in places. The lag felt awful, like it really messed with the gamefeel. But checking the FPS counter it was at... 45.

And I'm like -- Why does THIS game, at forty-five frames a second, FEEL so much more stuttery and choked up than ye olde video games felt at twenty?

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[–] tomkatt@lemmy.world 19 points 1 week ago (6 children)

Couple things. Frame timing is critical and modern games aren’t programmed as close to the hardware as older games were.

Second is the shift from CRT to modern displays. LCDs have inherent latency that is exacerbated by lower frame rates (again, related to frame timing).

Lastly with the newest displays like OLED, because of the way the screen updates, lower frame rates can look really jerky. It’s why TVs have all that post processing and why there’s no “dumb” TVs anymore. Removing the post process improves input delay, but also removes everything that makes the image smoother, so higher frame rates are your only option there.

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[–] lurch@sh.itjust.works 15 points 1 week ago

old games animations were sometimes made frame by frame. like the guy who drew the character pixel by pixel was like "and in the next frame of this attack the sword will be here"

[–] over_clox@lemmy.world 15 points 1 week ago (5 children)

My favorite game of all time is Descent, PC version to be specific, I didn't have a PlayStation when I first played it.

The first time I tried it, I had a 386sx 20MHz, and Descent, with the graphics configured at absolute lowest size and quality, would run at a whopping 3 frames per second!

I knew it was basically unplayable on my home PC, but did that stop me? Fuck no, I took the 3 floppy disks installer to school and installed it on their 486dx 66MHz computers!

I knew it would just be a matter of time before I got a chance to upgrade my own computer at home.

I still enjoy playing the game even to this day, and have even successfully cross compiled the source code to run natively on Linux.

But yeah I feel you on a variety of levels regarding the framerate thing. Descent at 3 frames per second is absolutely unplayable, but 20 frames per second is acceptable. But in the world of Descent, especially with modern upgraded ports, the more frames the better 👍

[–] Kvoth@lemmy.world 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Great games. Free space was almost mind blowing when I first played it as well

[–] over_clox@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago (3 children)

I haven't actually played Free Space before, but I did manage to get a copy and archive it a few years ago.

I also got a copy of Overload and briefly tried that, but on my current hardware it only runs at about 3 frames per second...

The Descent developers were really ahead of their time and pushing gaming to the extreme!

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[–] VinesNFluff@pawb.social 3 points 1 week ago

Descent is pretty fun. Not as big of a fan as you are, but I definitely dig it.

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[–] SolidShake@lemmy.world 5 points 1 week ago (4 children)

Bro when Majora's mask came out nothing was 60fps lol. We weren't used to it like how we are today. I'm used to 80fps so 60 to me feels like trash sometimes.

[–] VinesNFluff@pawb.social 10 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Ackshuli -- By late 2000 there were a couple games on PC that could get there.

.... If you were playing on high-end hardware. Which most PC gamers were not. (despite what Reddit PCMR weirdos will tell you, PC gaming has always been the home for janky hand-built shitboxes that are pushed to their crying limits trying to run games they were never meant to)

Regardless that's beside the point -- The original MM still doesn't feel bad to go back to (it's an annual tradition for me, and I alternate which port I play) even though it never changed from its 20FPSy roots.

[–] TheFogan@programming.dev 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Yeah but even now you can go back and play Majora's mask, and it not feel bad.

But as mentioned the real thing is consistancy, as well as the scale of action, pace of the game etc... Zelda games weren't sharp pinpoint control games like say a modern FPS. Gameplay was fairly slow. and yeah second factor is simply games that were 20FPS, were made to be a 100% consistant 20 FPS. A game locked in at 20, will feel way smoother than one that alternates between 60 and 45

[–] IceFoxX@lemmy.world 0 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

No more optimizations. This must then be compensated for with computing power, i.e. by the end user. These are cost reasons. Apart from that, the scope has become much larger, making optimizations more time-consuming and therefore more expensive. In the case of consoles, there is also the fact that optimizations have to be made specifically for a hardware configuration and not, as with PCs, where the range of available components is continuously increasing. Nevertheless, the aim is to cut costs while maximizing profits.

[–] otp@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Bro when Majora's mask came out nothing was 60fps lol

Huh? 60fps was the standard, at least in Japan and North America, because TVs were at 60Hz/fps.

Actually, 60.0988fps according to speed runners.

[–] bleistift2@sopuli.xyz 8 points 1 week ago (1 children)

The TV might refresh the screen 60 times per second (or actually refresh half the screen 60 times per second, or actually 50 times per second in Europe), but that’s irrelevant if the game only throws 20 new frames per second at the TV. The effective refresh rate will still be 20Hz.

That’s just a possible explanation. I don’t know what the refresh rate of Majora’s Mask was.

[–] otp@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 week ago (3 children)

I'm pretty sure the 16-bit era were generally 60FPS

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[–] MichaelScotch@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago (2 children)

FPS and alternating current frequency are not at all the same thing

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[–] RobotZap10000@feddit.nl 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

FPS counters in games usually display an average across multiple frames. That makes the number actually legible if the FPS fluctuates, but if it fluctuates really hard on a frame-by-frame, it might seem inaccurate. If I have a few frames here that were outputted at 20 FPS, and a few there that were at 70 FPS, the average of those would be 45 FPS. However, you could still very much tell that the framerate was either very low or very high, which would be perceived as stutter. Your aforementioned old games probably were frame-capped to 20, while still having lots of processing headroom to spare for more intensive scenes.

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